A young(ish) opera singer's random thoughts and observations.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

The colour of music

As you may or may not know, my Summer has been dominated by contemporary opera. First there was my London operatic debut (it wasn't quite as glamorous as it sounds :p) at the Tete a Tete Festival, performing my friend Tom Floyd's opera The Shadow of the Wave. Now I'm in rehearsals for British Youth Opera's production of Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera, where I'm covering the role of Tenor Actor (as if I wasn't confused enough about my voice type, everyone in the company assumes me to be a tenor until I set them straight).

It's all calmed down now, with Shadow out of the way, but the last month or two have been hard: there was a fair amount of difficult music to learn. And on the topic of learning contemporary music, there were conversations in both casts about how singers actually approach music that doesn't really 'roll off the voice', and if it does... You're probably wrong! For some people it's simply a question of repetition under the guidance of a 'mistake controller', others just have a knack for memorizing complex rhythms and melodies that have little to do with what's going on around them.

My personal approach is as follows:

The most important thing is time. While I can learn quickly, I avoid it if I can with anything more difficult than Mozart. With a lot of contemporary pieces, half the battle is tuning into the musical language of the composer. They're all quirky in their own way, and if you can absorb the quirks, you can feel more secure in your surroundings, so to speak, and this takes time. I don't mean months of daily work, but rather starting as soon as you get the score, and working little by little, even with big gaps between sessions for other things, but keeping the new piece as a recurring theme in your practice.

I also tend to write in beats in my score A LOT. Even for a basic 4/4 or 3/4 rhythm, but especially for tricky phrases. However what I don't do is memorize the counting (unless it's unavoidable), but rather practice a bit of conducting myself while speaking in rhythm. This helps me build an association in my mind between what I'm meant to be doing and what I can expect the conductor to do, which has one advantage over counting for myself: if something does go wrong (and to be honest, these things very rarely go perfectly), I can catch the conductor more easily than when I'm ploughing on ahead. In pieces where the rest of the music is more often than not more confusing than helpful, the conductor is usually your only friend, hopefully the friend least likely to make mistakes.

As for pitches and 'tunes' (if there are any), I don't really have a sight-reader's mind for intervals. What I rely on is what I'd call the 'colour' of the music. I can quite often pitch tricky notes out of seemingly unhelpful chords, if I get used to how they correspond, what colour they have in my ear. Oddly enough, when in that frame of mind it sometimes gets bizarrely difficult to sing notes that I'm spoonfed by an instrument or other singer (especially if you have to transpose by an octave! Who knew octaves could be so difficult?). This ear and memory for colours comes in handy in conjunction with a bit of muscle memory for getting back on track when I go off piste, because firstly I quickly know when something's wrong, and also sort of know how it should sound when it's right, so I can get it back even in the strangest of phrases.

I am by no means a particularly good learner or performer of contemporary music, but I enjoy the challenge and can feel myself getting better at it with every project I do. The approach I've described here has evolved over the past 3 years, and will probably require further tweaking next time I have some unnecessarily difficult music to learn.

As a parting thought: between Bernstein, Floyd and Weir, I have never found simple time signatures so difficult. The most mistakes I've made in rehearsals was in 4/4 phrases where I'd have to sing on the beat! That and those bloody octaves...

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Is there madness in my method?

I am a singer. My training in the field of acting is limited to basic stagecraft (mostly of the 19th century variety), a rudimentary explanation of Stanislavski from a couple of directors, and then just hands-on experience of doing what I'm told on stage.

I have noticed however that recently the roles I'm preparing seep through into my 'normal' identity. I would normally have classified this as nothing more than in-cast banter for the most part, especially since over the last year I've played a certain type of character repeatedly (I hope it hasn't reached type-casting yet! I don't want to play misogynistic arrogant twats for the rest of my life), a type that lends itself to humorous caricature in social situations. 

However, the role I'm engrossed in now is a neurotic, slightly deranged painter, who is plagued by night terrors. I have 2 mad scenes in a 75-minute piece. I rehearsed them both yesterday, and since them I find I'm not quite myself and am having trouble sleeping. Before you say anything: I'm not a method actor and I'm not going crazy. For all I know, nobody has noticed any change in me, but I have! It's not big, it's not profound, it's nothing too serious, but it's there, and to be honest... I'm surprised. And it has me wondering if actors experience this as badly as musicians, and do they have ways of keeping it from happening, or do they feed off of it?

I would think of myself as level-headed, maybe even cynical. I've been praised for my intelligence as a singer, not my over-the-top emotionality. Yes, I'm a performer, maybe even an artist, so I have a degree of sensitivity (which has, I have also noticed, grown over the years, I never used to get moved to tears, these days it happens embarrassingly often, up to twice a year), but I didn't think that simply rehearsing something could get under my skin. 

I suppose it's a two-way street: I bring to my performance my limited (but ever-growing) life experience, but then have to endure and carry in my self whatever the character goes through, which (when set to music well) is heightened to pretty extreme levels, so maybe no wonder that something stays with me? A five minute mad scene (albeit repeated numerous times in a staging session) has me sweating buckets and left with shivers (before my teachers freak out, I'm vocally fine! That's one detachment I'm managing at present), then catching myself staring blankly ahead when normally I would probably be horsing around... 

You want to know what the most embarrassing thing is? This opera was written by two of my friends! See what you've done to me guys ;) ? And what I now want to know is where you in turn got the impulse to create something that has this effect on your performer.

PS This doesn't necessarily mean the piece is that good :P (that's up to the audience to decide) I may just be an over-sensitive wreck who should stick to comedy...  


Now for a shameless plug: The show in question is in London next week, on the 16th and 17th at the Riverside Studios as part of the Tête à Tête Festival. Book here!

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Converted to the MASS

I am a bad listener. When I first started preparing for Bernstein's MASS, I only really listened to the fragments involving the Street People (which was the part I sang) and thought it was quirky but fun, with some minor jabs thrown in to upset the apple cart and keep the piece from just being a jazzy Mass. Fool that I was... I then tried giving it a listen through (I have been horrendously busy over the past couple of weeks, so time was at a premium, otherwise I would have started with a full hearing). I failed. I found it off-putting and inappropriate for the Italian Summer I was enjoying. So I ended up going to the first rehearsal knowing my bits and having an overview of the plot courtesy of Wikipedia.

For the first 2 days the Street People rehearsed in isolation from the rest of the company, so there was no impulse for me to change my mind about the piece: fun in places, but too pretentious for its own good. My opinion changed throughout rehearsals as I got to know the rest of the music better, but the penny dropped when we had our first run through on Sunday. It was only then, experiencing it in the call-response sequence that starts with the Choir and Street People inspiring each other to vocalise their faith (all this as a response to the prerecorded fragments, as if to say: we've had enough listening, let us speak!), with the Celebrant trying to keep a lid on what is supposed to be a normal Mass. Then the Street Chorus soloists start to raise questions and express their doubts in religion, faith, and God. The Mass gets more and more disjointed, the Celebrant starts to lose control of the situation and the Choir and orchestra practically get won over by the doubting Street People in the cacophony of the Agnus Dei. And then the magic happens: 14 minutes of solo singing from the Celebrant, a true 'mad scene', reiterating every bit of music we'd heard and throwing it in the 'congregation's' faces with abandon and asking why they're so shocked to see a man of the cloth losing it: they'd all already lost it themselves long ago, so why this hypocrisy?! The finale tries to calm the scene, and does serve as a good palette cleanser after the bile of Things get broken, bringing it all back to a grand statement of unity (that does sort of come out of nowhere I think).

I do think the piece is flawed in the sense that Bernstein set himself an impossible task: conveying a crisis of faith around the form of a Mass. For all its grand scale and epic moments, it's a very personal piece I think, and one I related to as such. Starting with the premise of singing God a Simple Song, and then failing as the whole thing gets more and more grand, elaborate and over-thought, losing all sense of innocence, which in turn leads to the Celebrant's meltdown. The treble soloist then tries to bring it back to simplicity, but soon after we're served with the rather epic and pompous finale... Does that mean that we're doomed to fail in our search for a simple, innocent, meaningful faith? It's open to interpretation.

But many people won't bother trying to interpret anything. They'll take the cheesy moments at face value, appreciate the orchestral Meditations as clever bits of pretty writing, cringe at the musical theatre settings of the latin text, and politely indulge the Celebrant in his 'aria', then roll their eyes at the final canon. The piece was received very badly when it premiered, and I can see why: it's difficult to identify what it's supposed to be. The name and form also serve to alienate people who expect a real Mass (though that element of shock factor is probably intentional). It is not a Mass. It is a piece of theatre about religion and faith that raises questions without really answering them. Like in religion, we start with the answers, and then as more and more questions get raised the answers we are given aren't enough to see us through. As I said, the composer set himself an impossible task, because faith is so personal a thing that finding a language to question it, or even simply explore it, that doesn't rub people the wrong way is impossible. Even the fact that the Street People respond to the latin lip service prayers of the Choir in English, translating the text as if to say 'Do you even know what you're saying?' is jarring at first and can instantly strike some people as crude. If it is, it's deliberately so: like snapping your fingers to get someone's attention.

I could go on ranting, but I'll stop. I hope a bit of back and forth from the point of view of someone who's performed the piece will intrigue someone enough to give it a chance and keep an open mind. I personally think it is a masterpiece (though not all the music is of the same standard, but then again neither was Mozart's) and a few movements do regularly have me in tears. There aren't many good recordings out there, I would recommend the Marin Alsop for best clarity and quality of singing, and Kristjan Järvi's recording for energy and impact. Or you can just listen to it on iPlayer in the UK with us performing it, or better yet wait until the 6th of September to see it on BBC 4. Here's a little taste:


I'll just finish by saying that I think Kristjan Järvi did wonders with us and is quite rightly a great champion for this piece, and that I'll always remember Morten Frank Larsen's Celebrant, as well as working with all my fantabulous colleagues from the Street Chorus (we rocked it!). What a way to debut in the Royal Albert Hall, hey?